Any sound at all that I play through esd, from wav or mp3 or anything else, will skip as if the playback buffer is underrunning. I think this is what's happening, though I have no way to confirm it. The severity of the problem varies depending on the load on my system, from small blips when the system isn't doing anything else, to constant static with a soft discernible sound stream going about 1/4 as fast as it should, if I'm building esound :). No matter how quiet my system is though I have problems. My sound files tend to be 44.1khz joint-stereo MP3s. I hunted around for the cause of this problem, and found out that the lines in audio.c that mess with SNDCTL_DSP_SETFRAGMENT are the cause of the problem, and if I remove them then the problem is fixed. Using some instrumentation I found out that with said lines of code, the sound driver is set to use 128 fragments of 256 bytes, while without those lines it defaults to 16 fragments of 4096 bytes. I am using redhat 7.0, with the following stuff: kernel-2.2.22-7.0.2 esound-0.2.20-1 My system is: Pentium II 233MHz 64MB RAM Sound Blaster 16 non-pnp OEM (had this for about 8 years) 80GB hard disk running at UltraDMA-33 The wierd thing is I'm sure I didn't have this problem before I upgraded my hard disk (from a 6.4GB) and reinstalled rh7. My new setup is the same as it was as far as I can tell, except for a larger swap space and root partition.
The stuff about SETFRAGMENT appears to be disabled in the latest release of esound. I'm not sure what version of Red Hat Linux that would have appeared in first, but it should be in 8.0 for sure.